As you read this, assuming the post office delivers the paper on time, a partial eclipse of the sun looms. This isn’t the big one. That’s coming on Monday, April 8, 2024. It’s a total eclipse of the sun that begins roughly at 3:18 PM and lasts for almost 4 minutes. The center line of that eclipse goes through Batavia, so that’s about as close as you can get.
Assuming it’s not cloudy.
The eclipse I’m talking about now is a partial eclipse of the sun. This is an annular eclipse. That’s the one where the moon doesn’t quite cover the entire sun. It leaves a bright ring. Pretty impressive looking. Pretty scary looking. It’s scheduled to happen on Saturday, October 14 right around 1:13 PM as a partial eclipse.
Assuming it’s not cloudy.
But let’s go back to the scary part for a moment. In history, cultures that didn’t understand Continue Reading “The Eclipse That Changed History”
Famous Eclipses In History And Literature
Facing his doom, Hank confidently warned, unless the king freed him, “I will smother the whole world in the dead blackness of midnight; I will blot out the sun, and he shall never shine again; the fruits of the earth shall rot for lack of light and warmth, and the peoples of the earth shall famish and die, to the last man!”
No one believed him… until it was so!
King Arthur released this Connecticut Yankee; thus, scoring the perfect theatrical tension in Mark Twain’s famous story. Ah, the power of fiction. To create worlds that we can only dream of. To craft scenes we can only wish for. To fashion from our imaginations that which could only happen in the land of make believe.
But wait! Twain’s story telling borrowed from actual events (as Hank Morgan attests in the Continue Reading “Famous Eclipses In History And Literature”